The Orders of Nature

Lawrence Cahoone

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781438444161, 9781438444154
• eBook ISBN: 9781438444178
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophical Metaphysics

Winner of the 2015 John N. Findlay Award in Metaphysics presented by the Metaphysical Society of America Reviving and modernizing the tradition of post Darwinian naturalism, The Orders of Nature draws on philosophy and the natural sciences to present a naturalistic theory of reality. Conceiving of nature as systems, processes, and structures that exhibit diverse properties that can be hierarchically arranged, Lawrence Cahoone sketches a systematic metaphysics based on the following orders of nature: physical, material, biological, mental, and cultural. Using recent work in the science of complexity, hierarchical systems theory, and nonfoundational approaches to metaphysics, Cahoone analyzes these orders with explanations of the underlying science, covering a range of topics that includes general relativity and quantum field theory; chemistry and inorganic complexity; biology and telenomic explanation, or "purpose"; the theory of mind and mental causation as an animal phenomenon; and the human mind's unique cultural abilities. The book concludes with an exploration of what answers such a theory of naturalism can provide to questions about values and God.

Part I

A Kind of Naturalism

1

From Pluralism to Naturalism

This chapter will argue for a systematic naturalistic metaphysics, understood in a particular way. The motivation is to answer, or diminish, traditional objections to naturalism and recent objections to systematic metaphysics. Doing so will distance my naturalism from others, including some held to be obvious, intuitive, or valid without argument as a kind of non-metaphysical default position. For naturalism is a metaphysics and it must be defended against two sorts of criticisms: that naturalism is too narrow, being incompatible with any adequate account of mind, meanings, culture and, relevant only to some, the divine; and that no systematic or general metaphysics, naturalist or physicalist or dualist or idealist, can be justified.

The naturalism described herein will be distinctive. As Section I of this chapter will describe, it understands metaphysics as fallibilist and a posteriori, and rejects metaphysical and methodological globalism, the notion that the validity of a metaphysical analysis of a thing or order of things hangs on the valid characterization of the most inclusive order in which it functions. Hence (in Section II) it avoids all talk of the Whole or Foundations, instead adopting a radically pluralist language for the discrimination of any being or evidence whatsoever. That is our background metaphysical language. Naturalism will then (in Section III) be hypothesized as the most robust theory to account for whatever is discriminated within this pluralism. That is, a localist approach to metaphysics allows us to adopt a naturalistic perspective within or on the basis of pluralism, resulting in a pluralistic form of naturalism capable of employing the work of multiple sciences while blunting traditional criticisms. Given all this, I will argue (in Section IV) that naturalism is at least locally true. The task will then be to work out such a naturalism in conversation with multiple sciences, showing that important features of reality can be included in it. That will require the rest of the book. The present chapter tries only to outline the project and show that it stands a chance.

I. A Fallibilist and Local Metaphysics

John Herman Randall, a philosopher at Columbia University, argued that metaphysics, on Aristotle's view, is distinguished from other inquiries by its subject-matter, not a special method. It investigates, “the general characters and the ultimate distinctions illustrated and exhibited in each specific and determinate kind of existence and existential subject-matter” (Randall 1958, p. 144). This approach differs, he claimed, from the traditions of metaphysics that have sought the Unity of existence, trying to synthesize all knowledge into a unified system, or the True Being behind all appearances (Randall 1958, pp. 124–33). Following Aristotle, Randall argues metaphysics is the inquiry that seeks the most generic features of the plural kinds of determinate beings that obtain—all existence being at least partly, not completely, determinate—and are studied by all other disciplines. This means what distinguishes metaphysics from other inquiries is its generality, not its method. Philosophy, including metaphysics, is inquiry, continuous with other forms of inquiry from physics to art history. It is only more general.

A century earlier the American philosopher Charles Peirce argued there is no type or line of argument that is infallible or certain or complete; there are only degrees of likelihood, trustworthiness, and confidence. We never know anything with certainty, and we never know everything about anything. We can hope for neither certainty nor completeness in any inquiry. Peirce extended this as far as to include even deductive arguments, for the simple reason that even mathematicians make mistakes. Sometimes these are errors of reasoning, more often ambiguities which accumulate along a chain of arguments, as do perturbations in some physical systems. As a result, Peirce claimed that philosophy ought more to trust a plurality of seemingly reliable and compatible arguments from different sets of premises than a single deductive series of arguments each member of which is dependent for its reliability on the preceding argument.

Philosophy ought to imitate the successful sciences in its methods… to trust rather to the multitude and variety of its arguments than to the conclusiveness of any one. Its reasoning should not form a chain which is no stronger than its weakest link, but a cable whose fibers may be ever so slender, provided they are sufficiently numerous and intimately connected. (Peirce 1992b, p. 29)

This means avoiding, as a basic or global strategy, deductive or axiomatic methods, as well as dialectical method (in which the content of one concept leads to an alternate concept it philosophically implies or presupposes, the combination of which implies a third that overcomes the antithesis between them). It does not mean, of course, that deduction and dialectic are never to be used, only that they ought not characterize the overall argumentative structure. Under Peirce's cable metaphor the justification of any claim will be a bundle of more or less independent reasonings toward the claim, what we might call argumentative pluralism.

Akin to Peirce's, and Randall's, approach is something that, oddly, seems to go unrecognized in some quarters: that the validity of a metaphysical theory can hang on empirical generalizations which might later be shown to be false by improved empirical methods. In short, metaphysics can be a posteriori. An example is Abner Shimony's notion of “experimental metaphysics.”¹ Shimony holds, as did most philosophers of the seventeenth century, that metaphysics ought to make sense in terms of the best science of the time. The early modern philosophers, however, attempted to do so by creating an a priori philosophy, in which the justification of their chosen ontology was deductive, although their reason for choosing it—in the order of discovery, one might say—was in fact its inferential appropriateness to current science. Shimony, following Peirce, is unafraid to infer, fallibly, from the empirical science to the ontology. Given his work in the conceptual foundations of quantum mechanics, he attempted to glean what must be true of the ontology of the natural world for the science to be as it is, taking into account differences of interpretation, likelihood of theory stability, and guesses at what may come later on. Of course, as Shimony rightly says, “One should not anticipate straightforward and decisive resolution of metaphysical disputes by the outcomes of experiments,” since the significance of those outcomes will be highly mediated by other notions and dependent on conceptual analysis, all legitimately evaluated with respect to coherence with explanations of other phenomena (Shimony 1993b, p. 64). Any of our claims, including metaphysical claims, are open to rejection based on their failure adequately to cohere with our other reliable guesses about things.

William Wimsatt, partly inspired by Peirce's cable notion, has recently developed another idea connected to argumentative pluralism, robustness (Wimsatt 2007, pp. 42–74). Those phenomena are robust to which we have multiple means of access, whether via multiple sensory modalities, multiple ways of measuring, or multiple independent theoretical inferences. The conviction is that multiplicity of independent sources of measurement, experience, or description, must enhance confidence (which is not to say achieve certainty). Following Donald Campbell's invocation of the importance of coincidence of object boundaries for vision (opacity) and touch (impenetrability), Wimsatt notes that access by multiple sensory modalities is a deeply entrenched human criterion of objectivity (Campbell 1960). One might say empiricists, positivists, and phenomenologists made similar claims, but they gave evidential priority to degree of immediacy rather than relative invariance across inquirers, observational circumstances, or areas of inquiry. Robustness is the Peircean alternative to an idealized immediacy that twentieth-century philosophy showed to be unavailable. Wimsatt suggests robustness is the appropriate argumentative strategy for error-prone beings of finite reasoning capacity, namely, us.

It should be noted in passing that a fallibilist and a posteriori metaphysics is entirely compatible with epistemic realism, the claim that our true knowledge is made true, at least in part, by its objects. (A fuller discussion must be postponed to Chapter 10). Certainly the validity, or truth, of our judgments is relative to a host of nested characteristics of the judgment: its natural language, its logic, its conceptual grammar, its perspective, its encompassing theory, etc. A chastened realism can admit all that. Particularly important for what follows, the fact that we aspire to true judgments made true by a relation to their objects does not say what kind of objects there are. There is a tendency in the discussion of epistemic realism versus anti-realism (the view that truth is fixed by relations among our judgment) in the philosophy of science to assume that realism must refer to entities. Some of the most sophisticated commentators continue to presuppose that realism is tied to entities, and so claim, for example, that since quantum mechanics undermines traditional notions of entity it likewise undermines realism.² But surely what reality is like, or what the objects of an inquiry are, are contingent questions that should not be preempted by the definition of knowledge or truth. Structures, relations, processes, interactions, events, states, or properties are no less real and may, given the circumstances, be more explanatorily relevant than entities. Epistemic realism need not presuppose a particular metaphysics.

Now to a key methodological point: metaphysics can be “local.” Localism in metaphysics signifies a rejection of methodological globalism. The globalism being rejected is evident throughout the history of philosophy in thinkers as disparate as Plato and Democritus, Hegel and Quine. The rejected view claims that the metaphysical validity of any description or explanation of any being or order of beings necessarily hangs on the relation of that being or order to more inclusive orders of beings, hence transitively to the most inclusive order. Bertrand Russell and others rebelled against F. H. Bradley's idealism for just this reason, that it seemed to imply that the metaphysical connections among the plural orders of things was so tight that nothing valid could be said about a cup or spoon until one knew the role of the cup or spoon in the context of the Whole (although Russell went on to construct what is arguably another version of the same approach). If we reject such globalism, the task of metaphysics is to begin with robust or more reliably accessible and knowable orders of things, and, having described them and their properties and performances, to relate those orders to other orders that are less robustly accessible or more controversial. Metaphysics on this conception is local, it describes one neighborhood, then another, then another, and relations among them. In Wimsatt's term, it proceeds “piecewise.”

Notice that this localism is not synonymous with what Husserl called “regional ontology” or Strawson “descriptive metaphysics” (Husserl 1982, Strawson 1990). Those try to describe the nature or the necessary and sufficient conditions of a kind of being or beings, e.g., experienced physical objects or individuals. These are specialized metaphysics of a particular zone of reality. Local metaphysics does describe particular orders but afterward invites us to push outward to other types of orders. It is general but not global. It does not say that the location of an order of beings in more inclusive orders of beings is irrelevant to the understanding of the former, or that we ought to renounce the aim of pressing our understanding as far as possible. Rather, it regards the location of an order in more inclusive orders as an ongoing project whose present unavailability does not undermine the validity of local ontologies. For it is the local descriptions against which any broader and more inclusive scheme must be tested. A robust approach to metaphysics does not hold its description of types of being hostage to a description of the most inclusive order. Hence localism concerns itself first of all with those descriptions of beings that remain invariant with respect to differences of global ontology.

Imagine three philosophers sitting at a lunch counter discussing metaphysics, one an eliminative materialist, another a Spinozist, the third a Berkeleyan idealist. The Spinozist drops her spoon and the others lunge to grab it before it falls. The question is: to what degree are their antithetical beliefs about the most inclusive order of being entangled in, hence determinative of, their perceptions, attitudes, actions, and expectations about the spoon, e.g., about what it is, what its use is, what is happening to it, or what ought to be done about it? With respect to local description, the answer seems to be: negligibly little. All three believe that spoons are for eating, hands can grab spoons, friends help friends, and eating utensils are better when clean, regardless of whether they think all is matter, nothing is matter, or matter and mind are parallel processes.

We may take a famous philosopher's example. Imagine an anthropologist and a native who share no linguistic commonality walking through the forest. Suddenly the native points at what the anthropologist recognizes to be a rabbit and shouts, “Gavagai!” (Quine 1960). Quine's point was that the anthropologist's observation of the native's verbal behavior, in connection with his/her nonverbal behavior and the observable environment, will always be inadequate to specify whether “Gavagai!” means individual-physical-object-rabbit or particularization-of-the-form-of-rabbithood or momentary-phase-of-the-process-of-rabbiting. The native's ontology could be any one of these, and no native behavior or anthropological observation could discriminate between them. Quine called this the “indeterminacy of translation.”

That famous phrase was overstated: the example shows only translation's under-determination. For there are all sorts of meanings ruled out, or made highly unlikely, by the behavioral situation. If the native is competent mentally, linguistically, and visually—hence an appropriate object of Donald Davidson's principle of charity—“Gavagai!” does not mean, “Dog!” or “Water!” or “Myself!” or “Don't look, nothing's happening there!” In fact, the possible meanings which cannot be ruled out or decided are a rather rarefied class, even if indefinitely large in extension. Leaving the ontology free to float, that is, not deciding whether the native meant “individual-physical-object-rabbit” or “phase-of-rabbiting” or “instance-of-rabbithood,” in how many situations of interaction with the native is the anthropologist likely to go wrong? Very few, as Quine recognized. The anthropologist and native could identity and re-identify Gavagai, capture it, together make it a pet or a meal, without ever going wrong. The point is the native's or anthropologist's ontology may have no decisive role in fixing the contextual meaning of “Gavagai.”³

In metaphysics localism decouples the understanding of anything from the description of the most inclusive order of being, whether that be Democritean atoms, Platonic Forms, a Hegelian Absolute, Husserlian lived experience, Whiteheadian actual occasions, Heideggerian Sein, Quinean physical objects, Derridean différance, or any conception of the Ultimate, the Comprehensive, or the Underlying. If globalism were true we would be in permanent trouble, for our knowledge of the ultimate must be less reliable than our knowledge of more robust scales. The extreme of physical reductionism, which would claim all existents are nothing but collections of or interactions among the simplest beings, and the extreme of idealism, whether Hegelian or Platonic, whether claiming all is a manifestation of Spirit or of eternal Forms, are equally violations of localism.

The rejection of globalism has two special consequences. Given the absence of reference to a Whole or Foundations we cannot assert the a priori or general priority of any one feature of reality, or any one method of investigation. Physics, phenomenology, cultural studies, pragmatism, biology, logic; quantum fields, experience, signs, social action, organisms, meanings—none is first a priori. We can of course make one of them first in our account of reality, but we must argue and give evidence for that. Its priority cannot be built into the conceptions with which we start our general metaphysics.

This is related to the second consequence. The loss of the Whole enables us to distinguish the language in whic...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I. A KIND OF NATURALISM
• PART II. THE ORDERS OF NATURE
• PART III. NATURALISTIC SPECULATIONS
• Notes
• Bibliography